From a Space out of Time: Russian Poetry and Aesthetic Ideology after the Soviet Union

Abstract

This dissertation, “From a Space out of Time: Russian Poetry and Aesthetic Ideology after the Soviet Union,” considers four examples of the first post-Soviet generation of Russian poets (born roughly 1965 – 1975) against the backdrop of the aesthetics and poetic practices of their immediate predecessors in the late Soviet underground. In contrast to the majority of current scholarship in this area of research, this book makes no effort to (re-)periodize or (re-)contextualize the experimental poetics it treats in a holistic or programmatic way (e.g., as “postmodern,” “neomodern,” “avant-garde,” etc.) but rather looks at them both as monads and comparatively in order to identify how they rearrange common categories of aesthetic production and ontological value. The goal is to grope for an essential sense of what happens to poetry in the aporia separating the “late Soviet” from the “post-Soviet” by positing points of continuity and rupture between what shall be referred to as hypothetical “aesthetic ideologies” that inform and support the prevailing poetic strategies of each. As such, it grounds its methodology in close reading and looks at two practices of the late Soviet period – Dmitrii Prigov and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko – and four practices of the post-Soviet period spanning the 1990s – 2010s: Aleksandr Skidan, Kirill Medvedev, Anna Glazova, and Nika Skandiaka. Finally, much of the book’s theoretical apparatus is based upon readings of Aristotle through Martin Heidegger, and some familiarity with these terms might be useful to the reader, although they are simplified and explained for use as a heuristic.